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The 
Island of Manhattan 

A Bit of Earth 



By Felix Oldboy 



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New York, October, 1890 



6 %^t Mam of jmanljattan* 

and furs, and the eyes of the red men found 
nothing within their horizon half so attractive 
as the beads, buttons and hatchets which they 
received in place of money in exchange for 
their lands. Guileless children of the forest as 
they seemed, however, these red representatives 
of the Manhattoes and Wickquaskeeks proved 
to be as wily as they were warlike. They 
reserved to themselves the right to hunt for 
game in the woods of the birch-bark country, 
the section of the island now known as 
Inwood; and it took two wars and a massacre 
which depopulated the Bqwery farms and the 
little hamlet of Haarlem to persuade the Dutch 
magistrates to recognize their claims in equity 
and buy them off at a considerable advance 
on their original figures. 

Governor Minuit, though a devout believer 
in the future of New Netherlands, made a 
better bargain than he ever dreamed, when he 
invested twenty-four dollars in the purchase 
of the Island of Manhattan for the Dutch West 
India Company. Sixty years later, in 1686, when 
Cornells Steenwyck, Burgomaster of New Am- 
sterdam and Mayor of New York, died, the 
house in which he had lived, a double stone 
mansion on the present southeast corner of 
Whitehall and Bridge streets, was inventoried 
at seven hundred pounds, and the rest of his 
real estate in proportion. It would have sur- 
passed the wildest imagination of those worthy 
men, if they could have looked forward to out 
times and have seen the assessed valuation of 
the real estate on this island of eleven thou- 



%%t Mmi} of f^m^mm. 7 

sand Dutch morgens, or twenty-two thousand 
Enghsh acres, set down officially for 1890 at 
$153535893^473' ^^^ ^^'^^ ^^^^^ Ward, which 
comprises all of the little city that the Dutch 
Burgomasters knew, assessed at $84,844,538. 
Even those figures do not tell the entire truth, 
startling though they are. The market value 
of the property is fully one-third more than 
the assessed valuation, and the bit of earth 
which is bounded by the North and East Riv- 
ers, Spuyten Duyvil Creek and the Harlem, 
is to-day worth, as men phrase it, more than 
two thousand milHon dollars. 

There is comparatively little of the soil^ of 
Manhattan left untouched by the hand of im- 
provement. Yet in spite of the march of 
bricks and mortar over green fields that have 
been blotted out, hills that have been leveled 
and babbling brooks that have been killed, 
the land has not lost its beauty. The roar of 
traffic, the din of whistling trains, the dust 
raised by multitudes afoot, have not abated the 
natural loveliness of its situation or dimmed 
the superb setting of its surroundings. As I 
grew up I learned to think this the garden spot 
of all the earth. I used to think that if God 
did not look upon this island of Manhattan 
when He " saw everything that He had made, 
and behold, it was very good," He might have 
done so. Geologists say that the trap rock 
under our streets and homes is the oldest 
part of terrestrial creation, and that it made its 
appearance above the face of the waters en- 
veloping the globe thousands of aeons before 



8 %^t Mam of pianUmn. 

Adam walked under the trees of Eden. The 
old navigators who first sailed into the bays 
and rivers of the new world were a reverent 
race of men, and something of the spirit of 
which I speak must have prompted Henry 
Hudson when, standing on the prow of his 
adventurous little gaHidt, the '' Half Moon," 
then at anchor in Harlem Cove, he looked 
up through the valley of the Spuyten Duyvil 
and out upon the emerald meadows fringed 
with wooded heights that have been yesterday, 
and will be again to-morrow, the center of a 
speculation and strife in real estate as mo- 
mentous as was the battle of Harlem Plains 
on the same territory; for he wrote, in his re- 
port to the Directors of the West India Com- 
pany, not only that "the land was of the 
finest kind for tillage," but that it was "as 
beautiful as the foot of man ever trod upon." 
Some day New York will remember the 
good words and great deeds of the man who 
uncovered to the world the site of an imperial 
city and who spoke prophetically of her com- 
mg grandeur, and will erect a shaft to the 
honor of Henry Hudson. Three pictures in 
his life are presented to me as I write, and 
they are in keeping with the vein of poetry 
and romance which crops up through the log 
of the rough, courageous sailor. We see him 
on a Sunday morning, in the summer of 1607, 
m the church of St. Ethelburge, Bishopsgate 
street, London, kneeling reverently with his^ 
crew at the altar railing, to receive the sacra- 
ment and a blessing at the hands of God's 



%})t Sfslann of ^mWtm, 9 

minister, before starting on a voyage to Asia 
by way of the North Pole. Two years later, 
in 1609, he is sailing under a September sun, 
past the beautiful hills of the Neversink, 
through the Narrows and into the bay, until, 
on the nth of that month, he anchored in full 
view of the Island of Manhattan, filled with 
wonder at the marvels of "the great river" 
which, little as he dreamed it, was to bear 
his name. A year has passed and we see the 
heroic navigator beating about the vast inland 
sea now known as Hudson's Bay, in an 
English ship manned by a crew of adventurers 
who rose in mutiny against their heroic com- 
mander, and the mists of night fall around 
him as he drifts away in the little boat into 
which he has been thrust, to be seen of man 
no more forever. Heart of oak, he paid for the 
romance and poetry of his nature with his life. 
In 1826, two centuries subsequent to the 
treaty of Governor Minuit, the total assessed 
value of real estate in the City of New York 
was $64,806,050; in 1836 it had risen to 
$233,732,303; in 1846, it had decreased to 
$181,480,534; in 1856, it had reached the 
large sum of $340,972,098, and now, after a 
generation has passed, it has become almost 
quadrupled. There are those who object to 
dry statistics, and say there is no poetry in 
figures. I maintain that the man who says 
there is no romance in the vagaries of arith- 
metic does not know what he is talking about. 
Is there no poetry in the statistics of Ther- 
mopylae, whose three hundred men kept three 

lb 



10 Wl)t 3l3laitlJ of i^anfiattam 

hundred thousand at bay until the homes of 
Sparta were sale ? Is there no romance in the 
record of thti three score minute-men of Lex- 
ington who, in defiance of the rules of arith- 
metic, stood up against twelve times their 
number and emphasized^ with the bullet their 
protest against British t)ranny ? So, running 
through the dry statistics of annual assess- 
ments just quoted, there is a suggestion to 
gray-haired men of business who are still 
among us of a wild speculation in Harlem real 
estate which created millionaires of a day to 
make them paupers on the morrow. In 1836 
Anthony J. Bleecker, renowned among the men 
of his day for his wit, scholarship and mag- 
nificent manhood, without mention of whom 
none would dare touch the theme of Manhat- 
tan real estate, sold lots in the far outlying 
village of Harlem for $1000 each, which, two 
years later, were sold for $9 each, over and 
above incumbrances, enriching only the law- 
yers as they passed rapidly from hand to hand. 
The dry record of these transactions is in- 
deed the romance of the Island of Manhattan. 
Clothed in flesh and blood it will quiver with 
animated Hfe and speak the story of the men 
and women whose homes, like their bodies, 
are now dust. When Anthony L. Bleecker, 
grandfather of Anthony J. Bleecker, whom so 
many survivors remember so well, was in busi- 
ness in this city more than a century ago, he 
Hved in Queen street, over his store, and far ^ 
out of town he had a farm which reached 
from the Bowery to Minetta Brook, hard by 



'Eljf 31j6lanii of jJiantattam ii 

the present Sixth Avenue. Its value was a 
trifle, but it was a pleasant spot for the recrea- 
tion of his thirteen children, nine stalwart sons 
and four daughters, and to their graves they 
carried pleasant remembrance of the pink and 
white apple blossoms in the old orchard. 
When it was first proposed to lay out the 
present Bleecker street through the farm the 
children objected, and one of the daughters 
insisted as a compromise that a fifty-fcot road 
would be sufficient, instead of the sixty-foot 
street that was projected. If the old farm had 
remained in the family, they would have been 
able to lead the Four Hundred m wealth as 
well as blood, but what was a man to do with 
thirteen children, and how could he have 
dreamed of the treasure hidden in those thirty- 
six acres. His descendents have seen the 
merest fragment of those acres — a bit of earth 
— the lot iit the southwest corner of Bleecker 
street and Broadway, sold nine years ago for 
$185,000^ 

Some estates, like those of the Stuyvesant, 
Rhinelander, Lenox, Astor and Goelet families, 
remain largely intact, but the lands that went 
by the name of De Lancey, Bayard, Bleecker, 
Herring, De Peyster, Warren and Hamilton 
have passed into the hands of strangers and 
lost their inherited distinction. As a boy I 
remember when Union Square was considered 
far uptown and fashion Hngered in Bond and 
Bleecker streets and about Washington Square, 
loath to obey the command of that inevitable 
policeman, Time, and "move on." Indeed, 



12 %lfe Sl^tanu of ii^m^sittm. 

my earliest remembrance is of the days when 
the neighborhood of St. John's Park was con- 
sidered the most aristocratic of localities, and 
there was not a family living in one of the 
plain but stately houses which faced that lovely 
oasis, whose members did not pride themselves 
on the blueness of their blood. Above Union 
Square stretched a delightful region of farm 
houses and fertile fields, country villas and 
green paddocks, bits of woodland, wastes of 
common lands, rocky gorges, silvery brooks 
and ponds famous for perch and sunfish. 
Nestling down by the East River on one side, 
and along the Bloomingdale road on the other, 
were country seats which were famous for their 
cheer and hospitality, and visits made beneath 
their roofs were like trips to fairy-land. Often 
as I am whirled on the elevated trains through 
miles of streets that have taken the place of the 
rustic lanes and dusty highways that I once 
knew, I find myself trying to imagine where a 
house long since familiar to me used to stand, 
or a wooded knoll was located, and I turn 
to see only an aged and solitary tree standing 
desolate on a brand-new sidewalk, the last relic 
of the vanished homestead. Even the grave- 
yards have disappeared and a newly imported 
citizen, lessee of a still newer saloon, draws 
beer on the spot where the family vault was 
dug and the ancestral bones were deposited 
with solemn pomp. 

A French savant formulated the law that in 
estimating real estate values, prices must be 
gauged by the number of persons passing a 



Wbe Mmn of j«an!)attan. 13 

given locality. The accuracy of this axiom has 
been tested and proved by the experience of 
London, Paris, and Berlin. Applying the same 
rule to New York, which finds it physically im- 
possible to expand except in the direction of 
Albany and the sky, hemmed in as it is by 
rivers and a bay, it is evident that fabulous fig- 
ures must be reached in the near future for prop- 
erty lying below the Post Office. Indeed, in no 
other city in the world has real estate in small 
and exceptional lots reached as high a figure 
as in New York. The highest price ever paid 
for real estate on the Island of Manhattan, was 
given in 1882 for a bit of earth — only 508 feet 
— at the southwest corner of Broad and Wall 
streets. The large sum of $330.70 per foot w^as 
paid for this little plot, but it was purchased to 
square the adjoining property and the price 
may therefore be considered exceptional. On 
the 14th of March, 1890, the property at 149 
Broadway, corner of Liberty street, 3006-6 
square feet, was sold for $544,500, or $181.12 
per foot. No. 7 Wall street brought $ 157-37 
per foot in 1882. The Equitable Life Insur- 
ance Company paid $155.75 a foot for the 
property at the northeast corner of Pine street 
and Broadway, and in 1887, the Niagara Fire 
Insurance Company paid at the rate of $141.10 
per square foot for the property No. 137 
Broadway. There is no doubt that the region 
covered by these figures is destined to contain 
a larger business population than any equal 
area of ground on earth, and the multiplication 
of vast office buildings is at once the proof 



H '€})t Sfslatnu of i^anl;attan. 

and effect of the costliness of real estate in 
this section. London has plenty of room in 
which to spread and the best property there 
commands but $63 per square foot, with no 
raijid increase. In New York, on the other 
hand, real estate is a giving and immediate 
issue and its care and guardianship demand 
the most engrossing, capable and concentrated 
business management. 

It is curious and interesting to watch the ad- 
vance in values on Wall street, from the time 
when, in 1682, John Pound, laborer, bought a 
lot 23x60 feet for about $25 (die price named 
was 300 guilders in wampum), to the purchase 
in 1773 of three lots on the north side between 
Nassau and William streets, by Samuel Ver- 
planck, for $1350, thence to the sale in 1816 
of the old City Hall lots (adjoining the Ver- 
planck residence) for an average of $8000 each, 
and so down to the purchase of No. 12 Wall 
street, in 1882, by John Jacob Astor, for 
$300,000. Remembering the City Hotel in 
its maturity, I find it interesting to see it 
assessed on the tax roll of 1815 ^t $90,000, 
and to wonder what old Ezra Weeks would 
think of the valuation now put upon theBoreel 
Building. At that time, No. 149 Broadway 
was owned by Nathaniel Smith, perfumer, and 
assessed at $13,000, to be sold in 1890 for 
$54 4j5oo. Governor Dongan owned the block 
bounded by the present Park Row, Beekman,. 
Nassau and Ann streets, and being thriftily 
inclined, he laid it out in a garden and for half 
a century or more it was a pleasure resort. The 



TOe 3l;5lanB of jWanliattan^ 15 

first lot sold was in 1773, vvhen Andrew Hop- 
per purchased the premises now known as No. i 
Park Row, where he kept store for many years. 
He paid $1640 for the lot, and in 1796 he was 
taxed on a valuation of $4000 for the property. 
Fifty times that sum would not buy it to-day. 
Like all other estates, when once disintegrated, 
the Dongan property passed into a number of 
hands, and this process probably in the end 
proved to be of the greatest good to the great- 
est number. 

The City of New York went into a some- 
what extensive real estate speculation thirty 
years ago, and purchased more than a square 
mile of'terntory in the heart of the Island of 
Manhattan, embracing a desolate region known 
as the Wilderness, a variety of swamps, miser- 
able specimens of Shanty-town, any number of 
rocks and several ponds fed by springs and 
equipped with sunfish and minnows, to which 
it afterwards added the wild, rocky defile known 
as McGowan's Pass, which had historic inter- 
est as the scene of a desperate skirmish during 
the War for Independence. Many prudent 
men shook their heads sagely and ventured 
their reputations as prophets that the city would 
not grow up to 59th street in half a century, and 
that its population would have no use for 
Central Park until the twentieth century had 
dawned. If they could read of the Park 
Commissioners' voting to run railways acroFS 
this somewhat artificial " dream of landscape 
loveliness," it might make their dust rub un- 
easily against the restraining sod. The city, 



1 6 ^}ft Mmn of i^anfiattam 

in 1853 and 1859, spent nearly seven million 
dollars for the eight hundred and odd acres in 
Central Park, and in 1871, the land was ap- 
praised by a special commission at something 
over seventy millions. The first tract, taken 
under the Act of 1853 cost about $7800 an 
acre. For the second tract, extending from 
io6th to iioth street, which could have been 
purchased for $4000 an acre, the city was 
compelled to pay $20,000 per acre. It proved 
an excellent investment, for in spite of the 
enormous outlay needed to prepare it for pub- 
lic use, the increased taxes not only paid the 
interest on the bonds, but wiped out the prin- 
cipal as well, and left the city with a balance 
of fifteen million dollars in its favor. 

An era of speculation followed the enact- 
ment of the law creating Central Park. The 
tract bounded by Fifth and Madison Avenues 
and 78th and 79th streets, which in 1852 was sold 
for $3000, brought $40,000 at a sale in 1857. 
Twelve years later, Mr. Wm. H. Vanderbilt 
offered $1,250,000 for this plot, but his offer 
was refused. When the city came to purchase 
the 120 acres of rocky ledge and ribbons of 
land that made up the area of Morningside and 
Riverside Parks, it was compelled to pay at the 
rate of $60,000 per acre for land it should have 
had the foresight to acquire at one-tenth of that 
sum. But foresight is a gift which few possess, 
while *•' hindsight " is the boast of every prosy ^ 
fiend of the button-hole who shouts into his ' 
neighbor's ear, " I told you so ! " 

When in 181 1, Gouverneur Morris, Simeon 



%\)t 3l3lanlJ of ^p^m^man, 17 

De Witt and John Rutherford, commissioners 
appointed by Act of the Legislature for laying 
out streets and roads in the City of New York, 
made their report to Mayor De Witt Chnton, 
they appended some " remarks" which seem 
odd to the present generation of city folk. 
They said : " To some it may be a matter of 
surprise that the whole island has not been laid 
out as a city. To others it may be a subject of 
merriment that the Commissioners have pro- 
vided space for a greater population than is 
collected at any spot this side of China. They 
have in this respect been governed by the shape 
of the ground. It is not improbable that con- 
siderable numbers may be collected at Harlem 
before the high hills to the southward of it 
shall be built upon as a city ; and it is improbable 
that (for centuries to come) the grounds north 
of Harlem Flat will be covered with bouses." 
Then they added this quaint apology with a 
moral : " To have come short of the extent laid 
out (155th street) might, therefore, have de- 
feated just expectations ; and to have gone 
further might have furnished materials to the 
pernicious spirit of speculation." Those were 
wise men in their generation and De Witt Clin- 
ton, father of the Erie Canal, was the most far- 
sighted statesman of his age, yet they have 
placed on record their belief that centuries 
would pass before the growing city would leap 
across the Harlem River and begin the erec- 
tion of a new city on the broad acres that then 
made up the homestead and estate of one of 
their own number, Gouverneur Morris. 



1 dill not start out to write the story of real 
estate in the Island of Manhattan, but merely 
to point a moral from the investment made by 
the first Dutch Governor, and the earliest and 
most extensive purchase of land at the junc- 
tion of the two great rivers. The money 
which " His High Mightiness the Lord Director 
General " paid for the entire area of the island 
would not now purchase space for a grave 
within its limits. Yet in spite of the rapid 
rise in values, the real estate of the island and 
the city is more generally distributed than ever 
before, and held by fewer individuals, corpo- 
rations and families. This is a decided ad- 
vantage to the community, for it not only adds 
to the number of those who have a permanent 
stake in the general peace and prosperity, but 
it swells the volume of business through fre- 
quent transfers, continual rebuilding, and spec- 
ulative changes in land. To own and hold a 
single lot of real estate in the City of New York 
is also apt to add several inches to the stature 
of the average man. 

A few years ago I sat under a spreading 
apple tree in the door-yard in front of a low 
rambling stone house that was built in the last 
century up in Westchester County, and talked 
with the owner, a hale old farmer of eighty- 
seven winters, white as to his hair, but with 
cheeks like a crab apple. He told me that his 
grandfather had built the house, on land which 
had been purchased from the Indians, and that 
he himself had set out the apple tree sixty 
summers before, to make a shade for his young 



c-^t JslanU of ^an^attan. 19 

bride when she came out there to do her 
washing. The girl wife had grown wrinkled 
and bent and then had died, but the tree still 
was flourishing and the grass that had scarcely 
bent to her young feet had outlived her in age. 
A wealthy neighbor wanted to purchase half 
a dozen acres of wood and swamp land which 
he owned apart from his farm, and had offered 
a generous price for it. The old man asked 
mv advice, as a matter of courtesy, but he had 
e^^dently made up his mind, for he did not 
wait a replv. He shook his head and con- 
tinued after this fashion : '' I donno. It 's a 
big price and mebbe it would be safe in the 
bank. But I like the land. It 's always there. 
It 's been there these eighty-seven years, right 
before my eyes, while the money comes and 
goes, and I don't know where it is. The land 
can't run away, and I guess I 'd better stick 
to it as long as it ^rill srick to me." 

The mulripHcarion of ownership in land in 
and around Xew York, the large increase in 
the number of urban and suburban homes, the 
fashion of cutting up large and valuable sub- 
urban estates into villa plots, and the tidal 
wave of healthy real estate speculation which 
has for its object the furnishing of homes that 
mav be owned by the people who now pay 
rent, these and other causes in connecrion 
with the growth and development of the real 
estate bu'siness. have made changes ad\-isable, 
if not necessar}-. in the care and management 
of real property. It is a natural sequence 
that a substitute must be found for the watch- 



20 %f)t Mmn of i^anljattan. 

ful eye of the owner, equally vigilant, prompt 
and painstaking, whenever the latter is absent, 
or where lack of liealth and other engage- 
ments prevent personal attention. 

It is a source of wonder to me in these days 
when the tendency is so great towards putting 
the management of all kinds of business into 
great corporations, that no company has yet 
been organized in New York to undertake the 
special business of acting as agent for owners 
in the management, rental, purchase and sale of 
real estate. It would seem that a responsible 
company under the management of experi- 
enced men could not fail to be a success in 
New York, and to meet a long-felt need. 

In entrusting business of this class to such a 
company the security would be unquestionably 
greater than with any individual agent, how- 
ever reliable. An individual agent may die, 
but a corporation is perpetual ; and the dan- 
ger of loss from any cause is reduced to a 
minimum. The capital of a corporation is the 
owner's insurance, and loss from the dishonesty 
of an agent falls upon the company, not upon 
the client. 

By reason of its greater facilities such a 
company could do most, if not all, of this 
work more cheaply than the owner, and could 
remove an immense amount of care from the 
shoulders of owners through the knowledge 
that the property is well cared for and the cer- 
tainty of a prompt remittance of the rentals ' 
produced by A Bit of Earth. 



ileal (estate 3toan anti 
€m^t Coiiijf anp of l^ciu 9orft» 



ORGANIZED IN OCTOBER, 1S90 
UNDER THE LAWS OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK. 



Capital . . $500,000 '^urplu^ . . $250,000 

30 Nassau Street, N. Y., 

MUTUAL LIFE BUILDING. 
TRANSACTS THE FOLLOWING BUSINESS : 

Heceit)e0 monc^0 on deposit, and allows 
interest thereon. 

^CtSi as a depository of funds on real estate and 
other sales. 

^tia as agent or attorney in the management, rental, 
purchase, and sale of real estate. 

;Ptaiiafftfi estates, collects and remits income, at- 
tends to the investment of funds. 

^tta as executor, administrator, trustee, assignee, 
receiver, guardian of infants' estates, and committee of 
the estates of lunatics and incompetent persons. 

9lcCfpt6 and discharges all trusts committed to it 
by any court, corporation, or individual. 



©fficerfi 



HENRY C. SWORDS. 

HERMANN H. CAMMANN. 

HENRY W. REIGHLEY. 
(Cnistecs. 

HENRY C. SWORDS, 

Member New York Stock Exchange. 

Late of Gold, Barbour & Swords, Bankers. 

HERMANN H. CAMMANN, 

Of H. H. Cammann & Co., Real Estate. 
Ex-President Real Estate Exchange. 

JAMES M. VARNUM, 

Of Varnum & Harrison, Lawyers. 

CHARLES C. BURKE, 

President Eagle Oil Co. 
Ex-President Produce Exchange. 

HORACE S. ELY, 
Real Estate. 
Member Real Estate Exchange. 

LISPENARD STEWART. 

JOSEPH THOMPSON, 

Trustee Mutual Life Ins. Co. 
Director Fifth Ave. Bank. 

EBENEZER S. MASON, 

Cashier Bank of New York, N. B. A. 



HENRY LEWIS MORRIS, 

Of Morris & Steele, Lawyers. 

EDWIN W. COGGESHALL, 

Of Norwood & Coggeshall, Lawyers. 
President Lawyers Title Ins. Co. 

EDWIN A. CRUIKSHANK, 

Of E. A. Cruikshank & Co., Real Estate. 
Ex-President Real Estate Exchange. 

CHARLES A. PEABODY, Jr., 

Of Peabody, Baker & Peabodv, Lawyers. 

JOEL F FREEMAN, 

Treasurer Standard Oil Co. 

JAMES WILLIAM BEEKMAN. 

GEORGE MILMINE, 

of MiLMiNE, BoDMAN &Co., Merchants. 

WILLIAM D. BARBOUR, 

Of Gold, Barbour & Corning, Bankers. 

CHARLES A. SCHERMERHORN, 

Agent Continental Ins. Co. 
Vice-President Real Estate Exchange. 

FRANK S. WITHERBEE, 

Of Sherman, Witherbee & Co., Port Henry, N. Y. 

ROBERT LENOX BELKNAP. 

DOUGLAS ROBINSON, Jr., 

Of D. Robinson, Jr. & Co., Real Estate. 

JAMES I. RAYMOND, 

Of A. A. Vantine & Co., Importers. 



JAMES M. VARNUM. 



^: 





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